Hidden widgets

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In many HMI applications, configuration pages are created on which configuration areas are repeated multiple times.

For example, it is typical for injection molding machines to have multiple heating zones. Depending on the design of this type of machine, these heating zones can be configured 1-100 times. To make the design of the HMI application as simple as possible, these configuration areas are copied to a single page and, depending on the machine configuration, the unnecessary configuration areas are hidden (visible binding).

At runtime, the image load time for these types of pages is typically relatively slow – even though it seems like only a few configuration elements are being displayed. The reason for this is that hidden widgets are also present and active in the background (binding of OPC UA variables). From the point of view of performance, it is therefore irrelevant whether 100 widgets are visible and 900 hidden on a page or all 1000 widgets are visible on the page.

All configured widgets on a piece of content are provided with data regardless of their visibility and also saved to memory on the client.Corresponding resources are also needed on the OPC UA server for each active OPC UA variable.

Optimizing machine configurations

In cases where it is necessary to replicate or dynamically display content depending on the configuration of a machine, distributing these configuration areas over multiple pages is recommended.

For example, if 100 temperature zones must be configured, these 100 zones could be divided over 10 pages with 10 zones each.

Alternatively, application logic can also be applied to dynamically load the pieces of content for the configuration in an area of a page by using action LoadContentInArea. This is somewhat slower overall but still faster than if all are displayed at once.